Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

An Open Letter to Maureen Dowd [Tynan's Letters]

Posted on | October 5, 2009 | No Comments

Dear Maureen Dowd,


Allow me, on my humble little handmade soapbox here at Tynan’s Anger, to explain to you why your paper has lost the audience of anyone except white people over the age of 45, and what your recent “opinion piece” about William Safire may or may not have had to do with it. There are a few facts about the dearly departed Mr. Safire that can be found on any quick check of Google or Wikipedia. One, he was a Nixon flack, the man who invented the modern flackery that you derided oh so brilliantly when Clinton and Bush were in the White House. His contemporaries on the Nixon flack brigade included Ben Stein, who has recently exited sanity stage left, and Peggy Noonan, the only other female op-ed columnist who rivals your status, and whose penchant for insincerity is already legendary in online media coverage.

It doesn’t take a brilliant journalistic exposé to realize that you are operating in a small circle, one that blurs the lines of hackery and flackery, depending on who you and your circle are writing about, what personal or political behavior annoys you at this particular moment, and what gives you whatever appearance of authority you like to have. In fact, if I decided not to click on the nytimes.com link but the slate.com link in my search for William Safire remembrances, I would find a spellbinding list of egregious behaviors and lies Safire engaged in over his lifetime. The biggest of all were the flimsy ground on which Safire held his skills as a wordsmith—the skills you and just about every other hack have vaunted in your various memoria. It may be easy to hide to older readers that you have gone from hack to flack for a man who went from flack to hack; those who know what words to type into a search bar are less easy to fool.

Lest you think there is no escape from this endless flack-hack cycle, Maureen, I would beg to differ. To dismiss Safire’s credentials as a language maven would not require a degree in linguistics, but access to a best-selling book from 1994 from a person who does have such a degree. In fact, in The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker spent a good 10 pages pointing out Mr. Safire’s inherent shortcomings as a language maven, and the rest of the chapter on his lesser maven imitators. The Language Instinct is a more popular book than any book Mr. Safire ever published, whether about language, politics, or the malleable line between the two that Safire exploited throughout his life. Those with fond memories of Safire’s columns must have either not read The Language Instinct, not have heard about it, or not have known that a popular book that thoroughly dismisses Safire’s respectability as a wordsmith. The Language Instinct, it should be pointed out, has been in paperback since most people graduating with college degrees today were in grade school. 


If they do not know to question Safire’s maven status, or even if it can be done, it is more of a fault of loyalty to your “colleague in columny,” and to an entire generation of hacks that confused columny with camaraderie.

Which leads me to the actual content of your column. The details with which you embellish your “working relationship” with the dearly departed Safire would be considered “TMI” and irrelevant to the legacy of anyone actually writing a memoriam with any sense of detachment, historical perspective, or ultimately, respect for the dead. Your charming allusion to Mad Men—a classy show about flackery on what your generation until very recently dubbed the Idiot Box—cannot hide the fact that Safire’s allusions to thongs, panties, and other undergarments for his female colleagues seem repulsive to anyone born after 1975. The historical context you provided with Barbara Walters’ statement is true to life, but pointless. You are talking about people who are still very present in the public memory. We can’t laugh off chauvinistic behavior with Safire like we can with, say, Henry VIII. There’s a generational gap, but not that big of a generational gap.


Of course, even if this column were a complete lie, there would be no way for any of us to know, and why should we? You’re a well-paid op-ed columnist for the New York Times; surely we can trust you to tell the truth as accurately as possible, and we can trust that if you were ever to skew the truth at all, it would be for “poetic license” of your Op-Ed that your fact-checkers have been trained to overlook. Even in an opinion column, we’d like to have a guarantee that what we are reading is based on truth, especially in a column in the Paper of Record by the person who has shaped our opinions of the Executive Branch of the United States Government for the better part of 16 years. Perhaps that’s why David Brooks, lacking any reasonable evidence to support the Republican party, has to use his jogging route as evidence for the crux of a column about politics for all of America, a column that caused Charlie Pierce to comment:

Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen an spasm [sic] of Beltway bubblehood so far removed from the actual concerns of people’s lives–so far removed that, last weekend, we had a gathering of the politically halt, lame, blind, and crippled in Washington, gathered for the sole purpose of petitioning various oligarchs to keep screwing them with their pants on.

The thing is, Maureen, you still see yourself as the public defender against the egos of the politicians and power brokers who shape this country for personal and partisan gain in equal measure. I completely understand how you still see yourself that way: if you don’t do that job, who else will?

But let’s take a look at the facts, Maureen. You worked with William Safire, the original flack/hack hybrid, for the better part of 20 years. You consider him your mentor. You educated him on the linguistics of lady’s undergarments; he educated you on the proper use of pseudo-Yiddishisms. Well done. If not for the wonders of modern technology, it would take more than 10 seconds to discover that your mentor, for whom you have just provided a rather lavish pseudo-obituary, was instrumental in developing the brand of political flackery that you have built your reputation upon lambasting.

By just about any definition, this would count as hypocrisy, Maureen. I know you don’t want to admit it, and your bevy of career experiences and accolades probably prevent you from ever fully realizing it. Considering your accolades, I’d be willing to give most columnists of your stature a pass for a cheap hypocrisy. The only problem is that it’s not a cheap hypocrisy, and it cannot be easily dismissed. His Girl Friday came out in the ’30s, Maureen. Things have changed since then. You have access to a job that puts you in the company of the world’s movers and shakers, which has granted you access to the salary, lifestyle, and parties that would now be impossible for any aspiring Maureen Dowd to obtain. You have been a long-time critic of confusing the personal and the political, and yet you have come to prominence in an era when it is easier than ever to see through your own confusion on that front.


Maybe that’s bad timing on your part, Maureen. Maybe that’s just bad luck. There was no way for you to see it coming, Maureen, and I understand. Nonetheless, you’ve fallen victim to the same trap Safire’s old boss fell into: you’ve willingly recorded your sins for history to judge.

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